NEG

Case
 Ballroom Bad
Ballroom culture is bad – it reconceptualizes a neoliberal orientation towards
politics and engagement
Heller 18 (Meredith, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies @ Northern Arizona University, PhD
in Theater Studies and Feminist Studies @ UC – Santa Barbara, Social Semiotics, “RuPaul realness: the
neoliberal resignification of ballroom discourse”)
In the ballroom scene, “realness” is a form of theatrics wherein performers mimic the look and demeanor
of, for example, a business executive or Ivy League student. Ballroom is a performance arena developed by
queer people of Color in response to pervasive racism in the 1960s and 1970s drag queen pageants in the
US (Street 2016). Documentary texts Paris is Burning (1990) and My House (2018) illustrate how
ballroom members linguistically use realness as an identifier for when a queer person is performatively
presenting “as much as possible like your straight counterpart” and “display[ing] how I blend in with
other heterosexual people.” Thus, realness names a specific theatrical gender-bending methodology
performers deploy at a ball to unmark their bodies as sexually queer and/or “gender nonconforming or as
transgender” and visually present themselves within a racially and socioeconomically specific form of
heteronormativity they do not personally embody (Bailey 2013, 59; 55). While realness is primarily used
to name this specific form of ballroom performance, it also operates as a larger in-community discourse
about how marginalization is effected via what Wiegman calls “economies of visibility,” or the rendering
of stratification through visual observation of difference (1995, 4). In this regard, realness is an ideological
outline for how marginalized people can performatively manipulate public perceptions that mark them as
different. But outside the ballroom scene, mainstream entertainment and social media deploy
realness with a starkly different connotation. For example, on the drag queen contest show RuPaul’s Drag
Race, realness is linguistically used to denote an unusually creative or unique gender-bending look (e.g.
“leprechaun realness” or “X-men weird angel devil realness”) (March 23, 2015; April 14, 2017). In fact, in
an argument between Drag Race judges over the elimination of contestant Courtney Act, RuPaul identifies
Act’s realistic looking heterosexual and cisgender drag character as “doing this realness thing” and
Michelle Visage retorts “I don’t want real; I want a drag queen” (April 7, 2014). This article
investigates the semiotic phenomenon of “realness,” specifically the difference between how ballroom
members use the term and how it is engaged across popular English-language media texts. Over the last
decade, realness has entered mainstream vernacular via television, entertainment news and literature,
and social media. In these forums, realness takes on very different connotations than it does in the
ballroom. Rookie Magazine (2012) says realness means “staying true to your roots and refusing to soften
or change yourself for the dominant culture” and Redefining Realness author Janet Mock deploys it as a
synonym for being “authentic, meaning who I actually am” and “proclaiming who you [are] to others”
(2014, 249; 77). In these contexts, realness is not telegraphing the benefits of mimicking heteronormative
identity but rather conveying the neoliberal ideology that publicly embracing one’s identity differences is
economically and culturally beneficial. Certainly the meaning and application of linguistic signs shift and,
in fact, some feminist theorists see term resignification projects as a critical means of altering power
interests (Butler 1993; Enke 2012). But, as I will demonstrate, realness’ significant semiotic shift is neither
affirmative nor neutral. Feminist resignification projects work to transform signs that are currently
serving the hegemony into vehicles that enable oppressed groups to articulate power structures and form
coalitions. Conversely, what I am calling “RuPaul realness” limits how marginalized populations can
articulate their own modes of success, thus transforming their own cultural product into a tool that reifies
the hegemonic structures that oppress them. I propose that a major reason for the multimodality of
RuPaul realness stems from frequent usage on RuPaul’s Drag Race – Logo TV’s most successful show and
now VH1 ratings powerhouse – and its extension to social media by the show’s producers and active fan
base (Wortham 2018). Hasinoff (2008) and Thompson (2010) argue that US-based “televised talent/job
search” contest shows model neoliberalism by framing successful contestants as those that understand
how valuable their embodied differences are (Ouellette and Hay 2008, 127). Neoliberal identity politics
contextualizes certain capacities of self as valuable “cards” in a commercial market. Thus,
contestants’ successes serve as evidence that they were “self-enterprising” and did what was necessary to
advance, including fashioning parts of themselves into marketable commodities (Ouellette and Hay 2008,
127). Brown refers to this as “human capital,” or the “economization” of subjects as their own
“entrepreneurial and investment capital” (2015, 35, 33, 36). Many aspects of individual embodiment such
as skin color were conceptually formulated as key human differences for the purpose of maintaining
power and stratification. However, neoliberal identity politics frames oppressed differences as unique and
authentic aspects of the self, and posits them as having a special capital advantage in a free
market. Contestants often model neoliberal identity politics by making pride-based statements about their
non-white racial or other marginalized identity designations (Hasinoff 2008, 335). I add to the literature
on neoliberalism and contest television by demonstrating how this politics is communicated through the
deployment of particular loaded buzzwords. On Drag Race, it happens when judges or contestants use
realness as an adjective for an unusually fierce drag look or winning performance. The high frequency of
realness usage on Drag Race may be due to the show’s “structured reality” format where producers shape
narrative and flow (Hill 2014, 116). However, I argue that any realness statements are coproduced with
contestants who desire to present themselves as likable or memorable characters. For the majority of
queens that will not win Drag Race, building this notoriety directly feeds into their future career
opportunities and successes. In this regard, realness is not merely a descriptor for fabulous drag but also a
coded message about the commercial power of putting one’s fabulously queer self to work. In this article, I
trace the semiotic shift of realness by first outlining how the term is deployed in the ballroom scene to
delineate an innovative drag practice, convey cultural commentary, and articulate a minoritarian strategy
of survival. I then explore how contest shows like Drag Race reflect neoliberal identity politics when they
commodify minority cultural products for mass commercial consumption. To document the neoliberal
context and deployment of RuPaul realness, I conduct a content and textual analysis of season 4 (the
noted launch point for Drag Race’s popularity) through its most recently completed season 10 (Framke
2017). I then compare this to how realness is used in various mass media texts, including in user-
generated English-language Twitter posts where keywords and hashtags are critical shorthand
communication devices. My study reveals that the widespread circulation of this resignified term
maintains hegemonic power practices: realness has become a polemical discourse that delegitimizes the
lived realities and success methods of the very individuals that created the term.

Ballroom eroticism is neoliberal – makes queerness fungible and keeps political

ontology intact
Crichlow 15 (Michaeline A. Crichlow is a historical sociologist in the Departments of African and
African American Studies and Sociology at Duke University (“Categories, Citizenship, Erotic Agency, and
the Problem of Freedom,” Small Axe, Volume 19, Number 1, March 2015 (No. 46))
For erotic agency, then, to be effective as a practice of freedom, it cannot merely situate itself in the
present and seek to indefinitely accommodate its sense of place in current regimes of biopolitics and
sexual citizenship. As Lorde insists, one cannot destroy the master’s house with the master’s
tools.26 Fracturing the present (or penises) through affirming one’s erotic agency “bottom(s) up”
is clearly insufficient to create the necessary freedoms that would have a transformative effect on
our lives. Valorizing the diverse sorts of erotic agency may be a necessary and indispensable act of
affirmation for sustaining a life of the self-in-the-world against the odds, but it is still
an insufficient condition for the effort of refashioning citizenship and unsettling the violence of erasures
in the past and present; unless one can show that of itself, erotic agency is capable of engendering a
politics that is aimed at bringing about something new, breaking with the old and obsolete structures of
power and place. How does a recognition of erotic agency enable such a mo(ve)ment beyond a certain
immersion in the present politics of citizenship in postcolonial states? Erotic agents may well be able to
expand the notion of citizenship for themselves. But, if the ontologies of modern power remain
reproduced by exclusion, one may ask, at what price Sheller’s “citizenship from below”? What is the
sacrifice being contemplated and bargained for here? What type of communities may be gestated by it?
[End Page 155]
The urge to refashion sexual citizenship notwithstanding, perhaps there is a more sinister or cynical
context and story to be disclosed here—a tale that undoubtedly insinuates itself into the ways in which
these erotic agents seek a “power of place” through dancehall cultural practices. And even if representing
an erotic agency, these artistes may thus still be reproducing in their tactics for survival or freedom a
sameness of market society’s fictions, fetishes, violence, and disavowal but at hitherto unforeseen
scales. The gender-bending or queer activities champion an individual freedom—challenging a
dehumanizing past and present but perhaps still deeply wedded to the promises that sustain
neoliberal futures. What is undoubtedly consistent with the past is the continuous exercise of a
struggle to overcome. Yet it appears as if futures remain shaped by the mantras of a neoliberal regime in a
country where state presences and competitive and violent sovereignties coexist, reflecting and refracting
an unholy politics that speeds up social and political processes of abject life. Might we be witnessing the
first and deepest cut so far against “ancestral histories,” of silenced agencies that makes this idea of the
inherent empowering potential of erotic agency a fading hope? This may be more sadly the case, if
dancehall and its associated forms of embodied performances can be read also as the thinking and
enacting of freedoms within the terms provided by neo-liberal regimes with their stress on self-
responsibilization, distrust of (or weakened trust of) the more productive forms of national state
governance,27 and a general drift to an alienating “cut throat market morality.”28

Their attempt to refashion this space into the ball-room reveals the extent to which
that space fails at activating resistive agency.
Harper ‘94 ( Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature; Professor of Social and Cultural
Analysis, English; Director, Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU (Phillip Brian, "The Subversive Edge":
Paris Is Burning, Social Critique, and the Limits of Subjective Agency, Diacritics, Vol. 24, No. 2/3, Critical
Crossings (Summer - Autumn, 1994), pp. 90-103)
It is easy enough to identify the constituent factors in the reputed subversiveness of ball culture. Jim
Farber's own formulation makes it quite clear that it is the demonstration of the "mutability of identity"-
effected in particular through ball contestants' achievement of Realness-that provides the requisite "edge"
to the culture's sociopolitical significance. According to John Howell, that demonstration inevitably raises
the questions:" [W]hat is authentic in social roles? Who does our culture reward and who does it exclude,
and how different are they? What is male, what is female? Can our chromosomal hard-wiring be
reprogrammed?"[11]. Howell's identification of these as "bottom-line questions" implies that the mere
posing of them is a radical political act; and since, according to Howell, it is "voguing" itself that thus
"leads us to deep issues," ball practice emerges, in his rendering, as the clear agent of subversive critique.
But, of course, however critically efficacious it may be, Realness styling itself appears as the effect of a
motivated regimen undertaken by specific identifiable agents, namely, the "voguers" who, in Farber's
terms, achieve "personality overhauls" by actively" construct[ing] their identities." These
formulations manifest a curious conflation. By way of indicating the intentionality of their efforts to
make themselves over as recognizable types-to "overhaul" their attitudes and appearances, as they
indisputably do-Farber concomitantly suggests that the ball contestants enact an equally voluntaristic
transformation in their very selves, figured here as their" personalities" and "identities." The positing of
such an accomplishment is potentially appealing for at least two closely related reasons: (1) it imputes to
denizens of the ball milieu an expanded agency whereby they seem able to alter apparently fundamental
elements of social experience; and (2) it thus recuperates those same personages as active producers not
only of political critique but of significant social-structural change. Thus the attractiveness of this scenario
is easy to understand. After all, a (if not the) primary challenge of contemporary culture is the
achievement of some degree of resistant political agency that isn't immediately undercut by any of the
various infrastructural mechanisms through which it is registered and disseminated; and for such agency
to be achieved by persons who are profoundly socially and politically marginalized as poor gay blacks and
latino/as would be particularly heartening. Whatever the desirability of that achievement, though, it is by
no means clear that it actually occurs in the drag-ball context-that, in other words, the effective
subjectivity exercised by the ball queens in the overhauling of their appearances constitutes such
sociopolitical agency as would be entailed in the "constructing of their identities." For this latter agency
implies a capacity not only to style one's aspect but to exercise some control over the conditions
of its general reception. However much they might enjoy such a capacity in the
ballroom, the subjects of Paris Is Burning were definitively shown to lack it beyond the ball
context when they attempted to redefine the terms of the film's success.
 Pose Bad

Pose’s radical potential is compromised by its obsession with presenting white

people as saviors and uses its actors as shields from broader criticism about the
shows whiteness
Martin Jr. 18, Alfred L. Martin Jr. is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication
Studies at University of Iowa. Martin’s research focuses on race, sexuality, and media industries. Martin is
currently completing work on his book The Queer Politics of Black-Cast Sitcoms which will be
published in late 2019/early 2020 by Indiana University Press., Pose(r): Ryan Murphy, Trans and Queer
of Color Labor, and the Politics of Representation, 8/2/18//ATW
This is the space where Murphy’s Pose first encounters issues. The “quality” discourse that
surrounds it  always already intimates that the imagined audience is white, middle class and
financially well off (or at least stable), and not one that is, what I have called elsewhere a BLAMP, or
black, liberal, affluent, metropolitan professional audience. In this way, then, it is free to engage with
pathologizing discourses about race. In the pilot episode, one of the series’ leading characters,
Damon Richards, a young black gay man with a passion for dance, is thrown out of his home by his
father, a move that is endorsed by his mother. There are, sadly, many young LGBT youth who are rejected
by their families and are either forcibly removed from the familial home or choose to leave it because of
the conditions therein. However, in Murphy’s hands, this trope seems to only play out when there
are characters of color involved. On Glee, while Kurt’s father almost immediately grabs a rainbow flag
and heads down to PFLAG, Santana’s abuela is fiercely anti-lesbian. I am aware that such action serves as
a narrative catalyst, but given the ways people of color generally, and black people specifically, are
stereotyped as anti-gay, that Pose is largely imagined as a show for white, cisgender folks is
problematic. White folks (largely) hold the belief that black folks (as a monolithic group) are anti-
gay (forgetting that anti-gay legislation, which often gets codified into law, is spearheaded by white, often
male, politicians).  Because of this belief, the beginning of the episode is understood as a narrative
catalyst. Pose uses the mythology that people of color are anti-gay to re-tether and reify such a
pathology that can be observed across news and entertainment media.

Part of the ease with which Murphy can engage with such discursive treatment of queers of color is via
casting. While Murphy seemed to eschew verisimilitude when casting wheelchair-bound Artie
on Glee with an able-bodied actor, or his choice to cast heterosexual actor Justin Bartha as one half of a
gay couple on The New Normal, Pose was approached differently. Instead of falling back on what Kristen
Warner calls the “best actor discourse”—the entertainment industry’s insistence that when casting any
role, the best actor is sought, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or ability—Ryan Murphy thought the
politics of representing queer and trans people of color was too great to be handed to heterosexual actors
of color donning gayface and transface. Murphy’s interest in casting queer and trans actors of color
can be read as merely satisfying demands for inclusion without actually challenging the larger
structural and systemic labor issues. As I have documented elsewhere, casting directors who are
engaged to cast gay roles (wrongly) insist that they cannot ask an actor’s sexual orientation or gender
identity. However, even if that were true, it seems queer that casting director Alexa L. Fogel would “just
happen to” be able to find queer and trans actors who both identify as such and happen to be deemed
“best” by whatever nebulous criteria the best actor is judged. I argue here, as I have elsewhere, that such
casting decisions, while wonderful, financially and professionally, for out LGBT actors of color who might
not otherwise find work within a big-budget productions, are subterfuge. These gay and trans actors of
color function as a shield for Pose’s problematic representational politics. Jeremy Butler has
argued that actors, the characters they play and their “star texts” become inextricably linked
within audience reception practices. As such, if one expresses disapproval of any of Pose’s
LGBT characters, it could be construed as a critique of actors. Such a set of discursive practices
functions to quiet criticism of such characterizations in a media environment in which representation of
LGBT bodies (not to mention raced LGBT bodies) remains precarious.
A second way Pose attempts to shield itself from criticism is via the involvement of trans activist Janet
Mock as a writer and producer for the series. Fascinatingly, Pose is Mock’s first credit as a writer and only
her second as producer, the first being 2016’s The Trans List. My aim in calling attention to Mock’s
involvement with the series and her relatively slight resume is not to belittle her talent; Rather I argue
that her involvement functions to deflect critique about the ways the show represents trans people
of color. It is important to note that Ryan Murphy is a white cisgender gay man who ultimately
profits (like Jennie Livingston, director of Paris is Burning, and a consultin/g producer on Pose) from
telling (and exploiting?) the lives of queer and trans people of color. While he certainly has opened
doors for these queer and trans actors, the fact remains that it is his white capital within a
fundamentally racist industry that allows Pose to be made. And by focusing on employing trans
folks, like Mock, Pose deflects the problematic narrative by trotting out the (secondary) trans and
queer folks who are involved in its production. 

In fact, Mock was the only producer to appear alongside Murphy and co-executive producer Brad Falchuk
and the cast at the 2018 Television Critics Association (TCA) winter press tour. At TCA, Mock spoke about
trans representation and that the characters in Pose were being written as “beyond the struggle with their
bodies, with people calling them by their right name. These are people who are creating new ways of
having family — chosen family through the ballroom networks.” Mock’s comments are important for two
reasons. First, she centers a post-transness that suggests that the trans characters within the series are
“beyond” the concerns of gender dysmorphia gesturing toward the notion that the “transition story” is one
of the most frequent tropes within mainstream media when engaging with trans people’s stories.
However, despite Mock’s suggestion, the series does, in fact, feature a story line in which Elektra
Abundance struggles with her body, and has to weigh whether her gender dysmorphia is more
important than keeping her boyfriend who does not want her to undergo gender re-assignment
surgery (spoiler alert: she goes through with the surgery and loses her boyfriend as a result).  

Concomitantly, in exploring dating and trans women of color, the series positions white men as the
“prize” for these down-on-their-luck women. When Elektra “disobeys” her white boyfriend’s wishes
and undergoes gender re-assignment surgery, she is evicted from the apartment that serves as her home
and the headquarters of the House of Abundance that she leads. In addition, Latina trans woman
Angel also seeks a relationship with a married white man who initially engages her services as a
prostitute. When their relationship moves beyond that of a prostitute and her John, he rents her
an apartment, becoming a literal white savior who “rescues” her from life living in a small
apartment that is called the House of Evangelista. Because whiteness has capital in what Dwight A.
McBride calls “queer marketplaces of desire,” the “obvious” choice for these trans women of color is to
desire white men.  McBride forwards that “Much like capital, whiteness is a valuable commodity in a
fundamentally racist culture.  Its value is so compelling, so complete, that it reaches even the most
intimate parts of our lives as sexual, desiring and loving subjects.” In this way, Pose gestures toward its
SLUMPY audience by serving up and centering whiteness as cultural capital within queer marketplaces of
desire even as the series ostensibly revolves around the lives of queer and trans people of color in 1980s
New York City.

Pose exports a violent colorist representation of Black women

Henderson 19, Taylor Henderson is a PRIDE.com contributor. This proud Texas Bama studied
Media Production/Studies and Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, where he developed his
passions for pop culture, writing, and videography. He's absolutely obsessed with Beyoncé, mangoes, and
cheesy YA novels that allow him to vicariously experience the teen years he spent in the closet. He's also
writing one!, The Cast of Pose Gets Real About Colorism: 'It Needs to Be Seen', 8/13/19//ATW
The groundbreaking Emmy-nominated FX series has recently faced a moderate amount of criticism
from some fans. Viewers have pointed out the supposed villainous attitudes and harsh treatment
of darker-skinned characters like Elektra Abundance and Candy Ferocity, who [spoiler alert] was
brutally murdered earlier this season. "Pose has spent all of the second season fictionalizing Paris
Is Burning by giving shocking storylines—ones that happened to fair-skinned people in real life
—to the dark-skinned characters," points out Court Danee in their essay, 'Pose' Has an Increasingly
Obvious Colorism Problem.
During the Televised Revolution: The Beings of Pose panel, Angel Curiel, Dyllón Burnside, Hailie Sahar,
Indya Moore, and MJ Rodriguez sat down with moderator Jayce Baron, where he asked the cast to
address the criticism from fans, specifically mentioning a line Lulu said during Candy's funeral
where she believed Candy treated her poorly because she was "light skin and thick." 
Activist Indya Moore, who plays Angel on the show, launched the conversation. 
"I think colorism is one of the most subconscious biases that exist because Black people also contribute to
it too and POC also contribute to it too, especially when you're light skin. You don't really see how you're
contributing to colorism. In a lot of ways that white people don't see themselves contributing to white
supremacy or anti-Blackness. People have brought up concerns around colorism. People have
noticed how Dominque [Jackson who plays Elektra Abundance] and Candy seem to be the
villains of the show."
 Economic Performativity Irrelevant

Performative theory, when applied to economics, is too limiting. The economy and
social relations require a more nuanced understanding. (mainly indicts Callon but
can be used for any performative author)
Brisset 16
[Nicolas Brisset - University of Nice Sophia Antipolis | UNS Research Center in Economic Law (CREDECO-GREDEG), “Economics
is not always performative: some limits for performativity” Journal of Economic Methodology, 5/19/16, https://doi-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1080/1350178X.2016.1172805.] bfinzer
The idea that economics creates the world rather than describes it has been the subject of
several debates (Aspers,2007; Felin & Foss,2009a, 2009b; Hodgson,2010; Miller,2002; Mirowski & Nik-Khah,2007). Indeed,
claiming that a theory, even if wrong at first, can shape the world and become right seems too strong for many economists, especially
if they consider themselves heterodox economists. This affirmation seems too radical because then any theory
could be true if it becomes a social norm. From its conceptual point of view, ANT assumes that people act in the
markets in accordance with their expectations of other agents’ behavior. These expectations are based on a stock of information and
economic theories associated with this stock. Therefore, agents’ expectations can be similar to the concept of expectations used in
economic theory: ‘I believe that others act according to a specific theory and I believe that others believe the same thing as I do.
’Thus, the theory gradually becomes a coordinating device (Callon,2007, p. 322), and there would be no wrong theory per se. Two
kinds of criticism follow:
(1) Firstly, Mirowski and Nik-Khah (2007) but also Miller (2002) emphasize the conservative way in which
performativity theory is engaged when it claims, in opposition to most critics of rationality
assumptions, that homo oeconomicus does exist, because of the embeddedness of the economy
in economics. To argue that economic theories shape the world is to stop any critics of dominant
theo-ries that effectively influence the world.
(2) If economics matters in the construction of reality, we need to explain how and why. A recent
debate brings this question to light (Felin & Foss,2009a, 2009b;Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton,2005, 2009). The key question is:
If science has the nature of a convention in the market place, is this convention purely arbitrary?
If not, it is necessary to understand why, in a situation of competition between several economic
theories, that one is adopted and not the others. Even if we consider this choice as a purely ideological one, ‘an
immediate question then is which of many competing ideologies ought to be adopted and why?’ (Felin &Foss,2009b, p. 676). Felin
and Foss call for a ‘reality check’ and argue that only true theories impact social reality because
agents only choose to keep a theory after its confrontation with reality. This contests the
direction causality. With performativity, a theory T is applied, and then influences agents’
expecta-tions. Felin and Foss reverse this: a theory T is a good description of the social reality;
this is why it is used by agents.
I think these debates could be endless because the definition of performativity is vague. I also think
Felin and Foss’s idea of a ‘reality check’ idea is important. Neverthe-less, their concept of truth is problematic because it ignores the
main idea in performa-tivity theory which is its constructivist stance. So I propose rebuilding the theory of
performativity using some classical tools of economists. Economists themselves have focused on
the impact of theory on economy (Brisset,2012a,2012b). This interest has gone hand-to-hand with the
issue of predictions in social sciences. Morgenstern (1928,1935, 1972) first emphasized the problem of
interaction between social scientists and agents in concluding that social phenomena cannot
logically be foreseen. His reasoning rests on a logical analysis: given a certain prediction or explanation, the
economist knows that agents will react to it. As a consequence, he anticipates this reaction and
revises his prediction which, he also knows, will be taken into account by agents, etc. This
process is known as the Morgenstern Paradox.4 It is the starting point for several works on the predictability of
social events when agents react to the predictions of econ-omists: a public economic theory is reflexive. Two important
articles, Simon (1954) and Grunberg and Modigliani (1954), focus on the possibility of public prediction regarding a vote were the
result. Their main goal is to escape from the infinite regress of Morgen-stern’s reasoning. The core argument is that there exists at
least one fixed point in the agents’ expectation function–i.e. the way agents build predictions regarding econo-mists’ prediction–
provided the variables predicted have upper (K) and lower bounds(k) and a reaction function that is continuous over the interval
k≤P≤K, where P is the public prediction (Grunberg,1986, p. 478). In other words, there exists at least one pre-diction which remains
correct even if agents take it into consideration in forming their expectations:‘The fixed point theorem demonstrates, when its
assumptions are satisfied, only that there exists at least one point, F, in which the actual vote (or the expected vote in the
probabilistic case) equals the predicted’(Simon,1982, p. 610). This prediction is, thus, self-fulfilling.5The Rational Expectations
Hypothesis is a direct implication of the Simon and Grunberg and Modigliani result. Muth (1961, pp. 316, 317) gives the following
defini-tion:
The hypothesis asserts three things: (1) Information is scarce, and the economic system generally does not waste it. (2) The way
expectations are formed depends specifically on the structure of the relevant system describing the economy. (3) A ‘public
prediction,’in the sense of Grunberg and Modigliani (1954), will have no substantial effect on the opera-tion of the economic system
(unless it is based on inside information).
Muth views the self-fulfilling condition as necessary for a theory to be correct: a theory with Rational Expectations Hypothesis is
self-fulfilling, and, thus, the true one. Sargent(1993) points out two components of rational expectations: on the one hand, individual
rationality reduced to maximization and, on the other hand, the mutual consistency of perceptions of the environment. The
environment, in a strategic context, includes others’ behaviors and anticipations in forecasting the level of a certain variable x.
Therefore, an agent a must form beliefs about b’s beliefs which includes a’s beliefs.164N. Brisset Expectations have to be common
knowledge and self-fulfilling. With Rational Expecta-tions Theory, these conditions are fulfilled by assuming that all agents have the
same representation of the economic system as economist. First, this representation is com-mon knowledge throughout the
population (including economists). Second, this repre-sentation is self-fulfilling: given information X, agents make X real, that is, X
is a fixed point f(X*)=X*. This is the meaning of Muth’s affirmation that ‘those expectations of firms (or, more generally, the
subjective probability distribution of outcomes) tend to be distributed, for the same information set, about the prediction of the
theory (or the “ob-jective” probability distributions of outcomes)’(Muth,1961, p. 316). Third, according to Rational Expectations
Theory, there is a symmetry between agents and economists(Sent,1998, 2001, 2002), and, therefore, no longer the problem of self-
undermining theory as in Morgenstern’s argument when we consider that agents know the objective value of the expected
variables.6Nevertheless, one could say that these conditions are not sufficiently restrictive: it is possible to find several sets of
expectations which are self-fulfilling and consistent. In other words, that there is no objective probability à la Muth. Indeed this is
the central claim of the Sunspots Equilibrium Theory (Azariadis,1981; Cass & Shell,1983).According to this theory, there can be
several public self-fulfilling theories which could be adopted by agents in their different cognitive frames and thus imply different
future realities. In other words, several self-fulfilling theories could exist even if they initially seem groundless, i.e. they do not affect
the fundamentals of economy (i.e. preferences, endowments, or production possibilities).We finally reach the issue at stake in the
different critiques of performativity: rela-tivity. This is an important issue needed to explore the
relevance of the concept of per-formativity more deeply and avoid the risk underlined by MacKenzie
(2009, p. 57),which is the risk of broadening the performativity thesis indiscriminately to all kinds of
effects of economics on economy: performativity becomes a loose concept because everything
has become performative. As Dequech says, the ability of economics to shape the economy has been both neglected by
economists and overestimated by Cal-lon (Dequech,2008). Are there then some limits and conditions to
performativity? This question leads us to MacKenzie’s distinction between Barniesian
performativity and counterperformativity(2006,p.31or2007, p. 55):Barnesian
performativity7:‘practical use of an aspect of economics makes economic pro-cesses more like
their depiction by economics’ Counter performativity: ‘practical use of an aspect of economics
makes economic processes less like their depiction by economics’ This is an important distinction since it
potentially gives us a basis for explaining why some theories perform and not others. Nevertheless, MacKenzie does not provide a
clear definition of counterpeformativity beyond what simply seems to be self-destruc-tion. Of course, this is an important idea (as I
will later argue). Nevertheless, it gives no clue as to why and how agents use a theory (or a device) in their daily life. Indeed, what is
‘practical use’? And, above all, a practical use of what? Is an entire theory cap-able of being used or integrated in a device
(agencement)? In addition, as we will see in Section 5, if MacKenzie uses the idea of counterperformativity as an empirical con-cept
(he notes that a theory can fail to perform the social world), he does not theorize this notion as a constitutive element of an entire
performative motion. As argued by Butler (2010,p.152) there is a difference between claiming (a) that
breakdown and disruption of performative operations can happen, and (b) that the risk of
breakdown and disruption are constitutive to any and all performative operations. The first is
empirical, but the second is structural. In other words, the problematic element of the Callonian approach to
performativity is the break with Austin’s project of defining performativity according to felicity condi-tions. This is why ANT is not
effective in answering economists’ questions about the limits of performativity. The inability of the Collonian
literature to grasp the idea of ‘performativity failures’ is mainly due to its willingness to remove
society from the social landscape: Society is imagined as a context or as a frame. Society is out
there and you imagine how to put this strange beast, the market, in this frame. It’s another
version of the infrastructure and superstructure metaphor. You have realities that are called
markets or economic activi-ties or society and what you try to imagine is the respective positions
of these realities. Developing an argument made in the anthropology of science and technology,
you must not imagine society as a context for different types of activities including economic
activi-ties; you have to imagine the process through which collective relations are constructed,
including relations that can be called economic relations. (Callon, Barry, & Slater,2002,p.291)Bruno Latour is
clear on this point. First, he denies the monopoly of the social macrostructure in the understanding of individuals’ behaviors, which
is one of the most stimulating contributions of his work: For the social sciences to regain their initial energy, it’s
crucial not to conflate all the agen-cies overtaking the action into some kind of agency–‘society’,
‘culture’, ‘structure’, ‘fields’, ‘individuals’, or whatever name they are given–that would itself be
social. Action should remain a surprise, a mediation, an event. (Latour,2005, p. 45) Second, he goes further by clearly arguing that
there is simply a priori no common world(Latour,2011). This is not a minor detail since this point of view
leads the per-formativity literature to ignore the fact that to perform the world, a theory has to
become a social device, that is to say, it has to be socially accepted in a world made of social
macrostructures that can put pressure on it (Brisset,2011, 2014a). Yet for per-formativity to gain explicative
capacities, I argue that it would be important to reintro-duce the social world in the analysis in order indicate the social conditions
for performativity.

Callon’s performance theory needs more nuance.

Boldyrev & Svetlova 16
[Ivan Boldyrev is an assistant professor - Economic Theory and Policy, Ekaterina Svetlova is an Associate Professor at the University
of Twente, “After the Turn: How the Performativity of Economics Matters. In: Enacting Dismal Science. Perspectives from Social
Economics.” 7/14/16, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48876-3_1.] bfinzer
But where does this vagueness really come from? A characteristic way to challenge the performativity thesis is
to claim that the ‘pure’ cases of performativity in its most interesting, ‘strong,’ or ‘Barnesian’
form— when the reality, after being represented by economics, converges with its theoretical
portrayal—are rather rare and it is thus not clear why the rest should interest us (Santos and
Rodrigues 2009). For coming to grips with performativity, it is essential to recognize that these
critics often repro- duce the ‘linear’ view of innovation Callon (2007b, 312ff.) so fiercely rejects. This view
implies that there is a separate entity called ‘economics’ (or a group called ‘economists’) that
should have real ‘effects’ and exert ‘influence.’ However, the ANT perspective rejects this simple
unilateral causation and treats economics as a Hegelian ‘moment’ in the complex heterogeneous
world (or network, as Callon and Latour would say)— in the totality of devices, theoretical claims, policy briefs, university text-
books, experimental practices, statistical measures, ratings, rules, and so on.12 What really matters for Callon and his
followers is the back-and- forth, uncertain, and staggering movement of performation—for
which nothing can be guaranteed. But it does not mean that the attempts to perform economic
ideas do not exist. They all should be accounted for— within a more nuanced perspective on
economics, markets, and society as their general frame or element. And it is this nuanced perspective that should both overcome
Callon’s alleged naïveté when treating ‘economics’ as ‘economics at large’ (Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2008), and provide non- trivial
answers to the familiar question on why some forms of knowledge become performative while others do not.

Economic performance is constrained by economic sciences which are used to predict and
analyze economic models

Nicolas Brisset ’16: Nicolas Brisset: University of Nice Sophia Antipolis | UNS · Centre de Recherche en Droit
Economique (CREDECO-GREDEG). Professor. Economics is not always performative: some limits for performativity,
Journal of Economic Methodology, 23:2, 160-184. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350178X.2016.1172805. JLeenhouts
The idea that economics creates the world rather than describes it has been the subject of several debates (Aspers, 2007; Felin &
Foss, 2009a, 2009b; Hodgson, 2010; Miller, 2002; Mirowski & Nik-Khah, 2007). Indeed, claiming that a theory, even
if wrong at first, can shape the world and become right seems too strong for many economists,
especially if they consider themselves heterodox economists. This affirmation seems too radical
because then any theory could be true if it becomes a social norm. From its conceptual point of
view, ANT assumes that people act in the markets in accordance with their expectations of other
agents’ behavior. These expectations are based on a stock of information and economic theories associated with this stock.
Therefore, agents’ expectations can be similar to the concept of expectations used in economic theory: ‘I believe that others
act according to a specific theory and I believe that others believe the same thing as I do.’ Thus,
the theory gradually becomes a coordinating device (Callon, 2007, p. 322), and there would be
no wrong theory per se. Two kinds of criticism follow: (1) Firstly, Mirowski and Nik-Khah
(2007) but also Miller (2002) emphasize the conservative way in which performativity theory is
engaged when it claims, in opposition to most critics of rationality assumptions, that homo
oeconomicus does exist, because of the embeddedness of the economy in economics. To argue that
economic theories shape the world is to stop any critics of dominant theories that effectively influence the world. (2) If
economics matters in the construction of reality, we need to explain how and why. A recent
debate brings this question to light (Felin & Foss, 2009a, 2009b; Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton,
2005, 2009). The key question is: If science has the nature of a convention in the market place,
is this convention purely arbitrary? If not, it is necessary to understand why, in a situation of
competition between several economic theories, that one is adopted and not the others. Even if
we consider this choice as a purely ideological one, ‘an immediate question then is which of
many competing ideologies ought to be adopted and why?’ (Felin & Foss, 2009b, p. 676). Felin
and Foss call for a ‘reality check’ and argue that only true theories impact social reality because
agents only choose to keep a theory after its confrontation with reality. This contests the
direction causality. With performativity, a theory T is applied, and then influences agents’
expectations. Felin and Foss reverse this: a theory T is a good description of the social reality;
this is why it is used by agents. I think these debates could be endless because the definition of performativity is vague. I
also think Felin and Foss’s idea of a ‘reality check’ idea is important. Nevertheless, their concept of truth is problematic because it
ignores the main idea in performativity theory which is its constructivist stance. So I propose rebuilding the theory of performativity
using some classical tools of economists. Economists themselves have focused on the impact of theory on
economy (Brisset, 2012a, 2012b). This interest has gone hand-to-hand with the issue of
predictions in social sciences. Morgenstern (1928, 1935, 1972) first emphasized the problem of
interaction between social scientists and agents in concluding that social phenomena cannot
logically be foreseen. His reasoning rests on a logical analysis: given a certain prediction or
explanation, the economist knows that agents will react to it. As a consequence, he anticipates
this reaction and revises his prediction which, he also knows, will be taken into account by
agents, etc. This process is known as the Morgenstern Paradox.4 It is the starting point for
several works on the predictability of social events when agents react to the predictions of
economists: a public economic theory is reflexive. Two important articles, Simon (1954) and Grunberg and
Modigliani (1954), focus on the possibility of public prediction regarding a vote were the result. Their main goal is to escape from the
infinite regress of Morgenstern’s reasoning. The core argument is that there exists at least one fixed point in the agents’ expectation
function – i.e. the way agents build predictions regarding economists’ prediction – provided the variables predicted have upper (K)
and lower bounds (k) and a reaction function that is continuous over the interval k ≤ P ≤ K, where P is the public prediction
(Grunberg, 1986, p. 478). In other words, there exists at least one prediction which remains correct even if agents take it into
consideration in forming their expectations: ‘The fixed point theorem demonstrates, when its assumptions are satisfied, only that
there exists at least one point, F, in which the actual vote (or the expected vote in the probabilistic case) equals the predicted’
(Simon, 1982, p. 610). This prediction is, thus, self-fulfilling. 5

Performance is not a mode of resistance - it gives too much power to the audience
because the performer is structurally blocked from controlling the
(re)presentation of their representations. Appealing to the ballot is a way of
turning over one’s identity to the same reproductive economy that underwrites
liberalism
Phelan 96—chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies (Peggy, Unmarked:
the politics of performance, ed published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005, 146
Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or
otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it
becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the
economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s
being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance. The
pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are
enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the “now” to which performance addresses its deepest
questions valued. (This is why the now is supplemented and buttressed by the documenting camera, the
video archive.) Performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, but
this repetition itself marks it as “different.” The document of a performance then is only a spur to
memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.
 Queer Theory Coopted
Queer Theory is Depoliticized and captured by neoliberalism
Pook 18 (Zooey, PhD in Rhetoric and Professional Communication @ New Mexico State University,
directs the LGBT+ program @ New Mexico State, MA in Communication @ Oakland University, MA in
Philosophy @ University of Toledo, “QUEER IS THE NEW CAPITALISM: NEOLIBERAL
TECHNOLOGIES AND A BLUEPRINT FOR THE LEFT BEYOND IDENTITY POLITICS,” May 2018)
Queer theory has lost sight of the ways political power and identity come to be and hold meaning in the
present. Once a powerful advocate for queer concerns, queer theory today finds itself in an unfamiliar
terrain with archaic tools in a rapidly evolving technological era. Concerns of the disciplinary age do not
hold the weight they once did; Gay marriage has been legalized, LGBT+ characters have emerged on
television, and information technologies absorb queer identity and experience along with everyone
else’s. Deconstructing oppression does not hold much weight when LBGT+ bodies are being appropriated
at rapid speeds by information technologies and neoliberal policies. For queer theory, the threat
of extinction via irrelevance now looms. It is my intention to reimagine critique of identity and
power through a reassessment of goals, tactics, and ontology, by way of a sober assessment of
neoliberal politics and technology.
Queer studies began to emerge in the 1980’s with works such as those of Adrienne Rich, Catherine
Mackinnon, and Eve Kosofksy Sedwick which questioned and interrogated an inherent heteronormativity
that permeates Western ways of knowing and being. It was the argument of these scholars that without
recognizing the internalized heterosexual structure within our thinking and culture, that critical scholars
could not adequately grasp or make strides in the plight of gender and sexual inequality. Queer theorists
are concerned with the ways that language and other symbolic modes of human comprehension are
mediated through a heterosexual lens, such as those which dominate law, medicine, and the media,
normalizing and disciplining bodies to heteronormative practices and knowledges, while violently
excluding those who do not perform gender and sexuality in ways that adhere to heterosexual norms and
logics (Wittig, 1992, p. 21-22). Thus, the task of queer theory is to locate, deconstruct, and reimagine these
closed discourses through a plurality of techniques that open up possibilities for non-heterosexual and
non-heteronormative expressions of bodies and minds. Queer theorists borrow from feminist theorists
the notion of partiality, and place a necessary ethical and epistemological focus on the social location of
the researcher and the possibilities that emerge from one’s distinct and unique social vantage point.
Acknowledging partiality is in part a relation to a skepticism of the mastery of any discourse that works to
promote discovery and ways of knowing that speak to a wider representation of bodies and ways of being
in the world (Hall, 2005, p. 6).
The goals of queer studies historically speak to the disciplinary age and utilize identity politics as their tool
of choice. Deconstruction of othering binaries, the dismantlement of
heteronormative master discourses, and the dethroning of a patriarchal logocentrism are inherently the
rhetorical tasks that mark the goals of queer theory. To locate critique, and open these discourses creates
the possibility to set the “terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such an incoherence
of definition” within them, and this amounts to a “discursive power” through “rhetorical leverage”
(Sedgwick, 2008, p. 11). This kind of critical and generative discursive work can be evidenced by landmark
queer texts such as John Sloop’s Disciplining Gender and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which by way of
evidencing and illuminating the construction of discursive heteronormative regimes that discipline and
regulate the use of minds and bodies to heterosexual knowledges and practices, also move to create the
possibility of agency through their transgression. Works such as Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body:
Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, Roderick Fergusons (2004), Disidentifications: queers of color
and the performance of politics, Jose Munoz (1999), and Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place,
are among the numerous works that continue this trend, interrogating the ways in which non-normative
performances of bodies and identities work to open closed discourses of sexuality and gender, generating
new conceptions of temporality and ways of being and knowing in the world.
It is my argument, and I think one that the aforementioned LaTour article sums up nicely, that identity
critique has become stale and formulaic. In The Straight Mind, Monique Wittig argues that our task is
to challenge and bring down the heteronormative discourses that order and limit our realities, and
not simply to create new categories of being, as those new identities would simply be rendered
and mediated through the same terms of heterosexuality if this unconscious and overarching system is
not challenged first (Wittig, 1992, p. 21- 32). Despite the fact that this essay is a landmark and foundation
text in queer theory, its tenets seem to have been forgotten or watered down through the materialization
of a formula in the field. A common reading that has emerged in queer theory is one of equivalence, in
which theorists conflate queer ways of being with heteronormative resistance. The examples are plentiful,
as the aforementioned text by Jack Halberstam sits as a prime example, alongside the work of Judith
Butler, and the work of queer rhetorical scholars such as Karma Chavez (2010), Gayle Salamon (2010),
and Emily Dianne Cram (2012), which all take up performativity as a liberatory, ontological tool. It will
late be my argument that Judith Butler’s widely popular notion of performativity in the early 90’s is what
solidified this trend.
Academically, these works all utilize or attempt to theorize arguments that generally speak to the social
phenomenon of identity politics, and the possibilities that arise with struggle based on racial or sexual
difference. In short, identity politics attempt to bring a kind of subjectivity to notions of being and social
organization, examining the ways that individuals are shaped and informed by their cultural experience,
with an interest in how these social formations might challenge or speak to power. In queer theory, this
has amounted to the ways in which queer ways of being might challenge or intervene in heterosexual
discourses, thus locating selfdetermination as the ability to shape the ways in which notions of gender and
sexuality are dictated. To draw a parallel, Malcom X famously wrote about the binaries and definitions of
black and white, and Stokely Carmichael (2015) advocated for the recognition of Black experience to
inform a new kind of politics in America, both referencing the need to disrupt and ultimately gain a voice
in the master discourse, illustrating the function of a politics organized around a shared political and
social experience (p. 150- 174). Thus, identity politics rest on the ultimate belief that the experiences,
knowledge, and practices of those who exist outside dominant conceptions of power and privilege contain
the epistemological tools to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor, from the dominant paradigms
that determine their relations, by revealing the inherent oppression in their lived relationships.
But what does a dominant discourse do or mean in 2018, when today, each click of the
mouse turns information into capital, and data is packaged, repackaged, and sold all over the world in
seconds, as economic wars are waged with virtual funds through algorithms? In his 1993 essay,
“Feminism, Ideology and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist view,” Richard Rorty asks a controversial and
important question: Even if all the logocentrisms, binaries, and technical discourses, which mediate
heteronormative ideologies, were done away with, wouldn’t patriarchal power still persist? (p. 232). Rorty
was speaking of the problematic force behind discourse, referencing systems of power and inequalities
themselves, but today things are only more complicated as individual
thought and expression are appropriated through our daily use of internet technologies. In short,
today it is not only power itself which poses a reasonable concern to those doing discourse analysis, but
the appropriation of discourse and power into the singular flow of information and resources in the
networks of neoliberal power. It will be my argument that queer theory will need a theoretical
overhaul to form a viable system of critique to make sense of and challenge the ways which we emerge
as postfordist subjects through our mediation via information technologies. It is not through
institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to exist
through and for neoliberal networks via our participation on the internet. Today, dominant discourses are
algorithms and all voices are equally commodifiable. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri speak of this
totalization in their notion of Empire: “Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural
exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map
of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow” (p. xii-xiii). Again, how can queer
identity challenge power when neoliberal power is already queer, decentralized, without temporal
boundaries, and completely immersive?
 Speaking For Others/Allyship Bad

They continue the project of Taylor Swift deradicalizing and stealing queer theory
for pop culture and the straight white masses
Bryant 15, Derek Bryant, Master of Arts (MA) in communication, A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Queer
Appropriation in Digital Spaces, 5/1/22/ATW
While these protests are an issue, there are much more pressing issues and examples of anti-
LGBTQ+ movements and organizations, such as the American Family Association, the Alliance for
Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI), the Family Research Institute, Positive Approaches
To Healthy Sexuality (PATH), among others. A majority of these organizations and institutions seek
to criminalize homosexuality and support conversion therapy as a legitimate way to change
one’s sexuality. These organizations are actively creating false information and bias research as a
way to support their own claims against homosexuality. This process is much more complex and
dangerous than holding a sign during a protest and representing these ongoing threats to the
queer community as a single, small group of protesters who “need to calm down” minimizes
those ongoing struggles.
The lyrics also appropriate queer lingo, similar to how Black vernacular is appropriated by
White people for profit (Smitherman, 1998). For example, the line: “Cause shade never made
anybody less gay” borrows the word “shade” from queer communities of color; the term was
popularized by Dorian Corey in a documentary titled, Paris is Burning about New York ballroom
culture.5 When someone throws shade it means that they are insulting someone, often playfully and
indirectly, but it is a term and a popular pastime of those who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Thus,
this appropriation is two-fold of drag/ballroom culture, and people of color who popularized the
phrase. By talking about anti-LGBTQ+ organizations and protestors throwing shade, Swift is
characterizing hate speech, slurs, and anti-LGBTQ messages as “shade,” thereby further
trivializing the protestors’ actions and undermining the original meaning of the term.
Another example of word appropriation is the term “tea” or the phrase “spill the tea,” which is
shorthand for getting the “truth” about a scandal or gossip. While not directly stated in the
lyrics, tea or spilling the tea is seen within the music video. This visual reference is first seen
when it quickly shows Tan France walking, then winking at the camera, and then drinking tea
directly from a floral teapot. Later, Swift is sitting with the Fab Five, minus France, around a table
outside having a tea party. All the people at the table then clink their teacups together before looking up
and winking at the camera, in a similar fashion as France, with the implication that the winks are directed
at the protestors, who cannot disrupt their good time drinking tea. While there is an empowering
message here that the queer community is unbothered by “haters,” this scene can also be
interpreted as the ultimate solution to homophobia and transphobia is to simply ignore the
problems and barriers to equality and equity that queer people face instead of enacting
meaningful change. The political landscape is not meaningful challenged in this video by viewers
being told to sign a petition and “calm down” by not being homophobic without acknowledging
contemporary struggles, risking Swift’s own popularity, or calling for systemic change.
OFF
 Links – Antiblackness
queer theory as an analytic of sociality juxtaposes blackness as conservative – the
aff cannot account for the ways that gender and sexuality are scripted differently
onto black flesh – at best the aff is a restructuring of western Man around the
white, queer subject – the impact is fungibility
King ‘19 [Tiffany Lethabo King is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at
Georgia State University.] [King, Tiffany. The Black Shoals. Offshore Formations of Black and Native
Studies., 2019. Pg. 132-5]
In the nether regions of the indigo plantation, Black bodies may merge/ mate with plants and create the
commodity dye. Black bodies as hybrid plant bodies assume another level of nonnormative and
nonhuman sexual excess when situated within the context of the emergence of modern sexu- ality. Black
open, porous bodies both traffic within discourses of sexuality as slippery, wet, and always open and
transgress the purview of the sexual. The Black enslaved body embedded within ecotonal processes that
tropi- calize the landscape of the plantation present new racial and sexual coordi- nates of human
alterity. Black bodies (at the place of the pore) are gender- less, sensual, penetrable, sexual, fecund, and
boundless in ways that queer theory cannot give an account. Attending to flesh/pores at their encounter
with the pores of indican moves into proximity with the ways that Spillers “breaks” the gender speci- ficity
of Black flesh under enslavement. The ostensibly male slaves who par- ticipated in indigo processing were
susceptible to the same kind of stain- ing, abjection, and sometimes death (likened to cancer) related to
toxic exposure as “female flesh unprotected.” At the level of pores, the Black bodies in Dash’s movie and
those working the indigo on the map are un- gendered by their capacity for porosity and functioning as
sites of tran- sit for chemicals. In fact, gender ambiguity and genderlessness (or the un- gendering of the
captive) is part of the reason that Blackness gets scripted out of coherent human genres.47 These indigo
Black bodies are also sites of open and unbounded exchange and entry at their pores. These kinds of fluid
and open bodies become signs of sensuality, movement, and ex- change and often metaphors for the
sexual. While the stained Black pore as a sign of sensuality, movement, and transit runs alongside the
sexual, its penetrability is not solely linked to the genital-anus complex. Nor do Black bodies achieve
nonnormative status primarily through sex and the sexual metaphors proffered by queer
theory. Homosexual/queer subjects (contemporary LGBT individuals) and theory begin in and with
the new genres of the human that emerged in late nineteenth-century sexology. During this era of White
sexual differen- tiation and particularity, Dash’s characters contend with the generational poisoning and
staining of their pores as sensual and, therefore, deselected beings. I stress this point for a few reasons.
One reason is that mainstream queer theory does not do an adequate job of conceptualizing how
Blackness re- configures Western gender and sexuality. Furthermore, queer theory arro- gantly assumes
that Western gender and sexuality—and their modalities of nonnormativity—can be mapped onto the
corporeality of Blackness. For example, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s assertion in the introduction to Beauti-
ful Bottom, Beautiful Shame that the work of antiracist Black literature has led to a congealing of
Blackness is an example of this kind of arrogant mis- reading. Moreover, Stockton argues that Blackness
truly becomes a con- tagious and spreadable matter only on the back of queerness. When con- sidering
the speculative and imaginative work of Dash and of other Black diaspora scholars (particularly those
focusing on the Atlantic, oceanic, fun- gible, and the fugitive), I question Stockton’s reading of Black
literary and cultural production. If anything, Blackness enters Western modernity from a place
of spreadability and boundarylessness made possible by the Middle Passage and various processes that
render it outside of coherent and con- tained human coordinates. It is also from within this place
of spreadability, diffuseness, abjection, and nonhumanness from which Black people seek an alternative
mode of being human.48 As Spillers suggested in 1987, as cap- tives turned into malleable “territories of
political and cultural maneuver,” the community of ex-slaves had “nothing to prove.”49 Stockton attempts
to establish the foundations for an argument that the Black literary and cultural imagination needs to be
queered and made a spreadable contaminant. Before Stockton can have White queer theory make this
intervention or augment the Black antiracist literary tradition, she must read Blackness as congealed.
Stockton confidently reads Black antiracist and queer literature as rigid or solid(ly) afraid of its own
spread- ability as a contagion.50 In contrast, queer (read White) activists and theo- rists (e.g., Lauren
Berlant, Judith Butler, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edel- man, Joseph Litvak, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and
Michael Warner) “have worked to restate ‘queer’ as ‘strange,’ to break against any scripted iden- tities for
‘gays’ or ‘homosexuals’—to break with congealment, as it were. And yet, in a sense, they would willingly,
gladly, spread contamination. They would make supposedly ‘normal’ sexualities confess their strangeness
and, therefore, their queerness, lending ‘normal’ sex a whiff of their slang.”51 Celebrating the queer and
contaminating nature of White queer strangeness and its embrace of the
nonnormative, Stockton juxtaposes Blackness as conservative, normative, and fearful of leaking out of
bounds. Stockton observes, “As for ‘black’ there’s a different dynamic. A dynamic nearly opposite. . . . The
range of contaminating significations sticking to ‘black,’ even so, has led, in rather remarkable fashion, to
politically sensitive forms of congealment on the part of some anti-racists advocates.”52 Rather than
rehearse the “antiracist” traditions that have refused the politics of respectability and used Black
otherness and nonhumanness as a resource, I challenge Stockton to make this claim stick. Stockton is
clearly reading outside the interdisciplinary tradition of Black studies that has already em- braced Black
deviance and nonnormativity as a mode of life outside liberal humanity.53 Before Black queer theory
emerges, Black literary criticism already con- strues Black diasporic movement, migration, cultural
production, and self- making as boundaryless. Black cultural studies in particular traces Black diasporic
lifeways among Paul Gilroy’s rhizomorphic oceanic flows of the Black Atlantic that exceed and spread
beyond normative units such as the nation-state. Gilroy traces this history of Black oceanic and
spreadable cul- tural flows even before the nineteenth century. Black spreadability was an essential, if not
constitutive, part of Black diasporic and Atlantic episte- mologies before the advent of White queer
theory. Black studies has not had to reach for or enact spreadability and contamination in the way
that nonintersectional queer theory has had to exert itself to take up the
con- tamination of nonnormativity. In fact, Black studies, as a social field both within and beyond Black
queer theory, has argued that both LGBT identity claims and queer theory work from a space of normative
identity. Greg Thomas traces how the “be- yond” in Wynter’s work takes us beyond humanist aspirations
and the in- ternal epistemic revolutions of the West and how Wynter attributes the “specific articulations
of both heterosexuality and homosexuality to the Darwinian reinvention of Man (2) in 19th century
Europe.”54 As Wynter tracks the emergence and reproduction of Man, she scrutinizes
how the reconfiguration of the nineteenth-century human reshapes itself through the inclusion of
queer or homosexual diversity. Marx’s worker as subject in the nineteenth century can also be a rational
wage-earning homosexual (or female) proletarian. The laborer as woman or homosexual knows itself as a
free wage laborer (with the choice of sexual expression and identity) through the captivity of the fungible
slave who also labors. The European White proletarian who has achieved sexual liberation and identity
(hetero- and homosexual) through the individuating power of the wage becomes an
intensified Foucauldian individual and subject in relation to the en- slaved, nonwage work of Blacks, who
are expelled from the boundaries of the rational human wage worker and sexual subject.

Performance is an antiblack strategy—it leads presumes a notion of consent that

blackness disarticulates and gets commodified for white enjoyment
Hartman and Wilderson ‘3 (Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, “Position of the
Unthought: an Interview with Saidiya Hartman conducted by Frank Wilderson,” Qui Parle, 13(2) 2003.)
S.V.H. — But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda that subjects who are variously
positioned on the color line can take up. And that project is something I consider obscene: the attempt to
make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the
brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves. That's not my project
at all, though I think it's actually the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social
revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were trying to locate the agency of
dominated groups, resulted in celebratory narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it bled into this
celebration, as if there was a space you could carve out of the terrorizing state apparatus in order to exist
outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in particular, one of my
hidden polemics in the book was an argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has
been taken up in the context of looking at the status of the slave. F.W. — That's very interesting, because
it's something I've been thinking about also in respect to Gramsci. Because Anne Showstack Sassoon
suggests that Gramsci breaks down hegemony into three categories: influence, leadership, and
consent.5 Maybe we could bring the discussion back to your text then, using the examples of Harriet
Jacobs,6 a slave, and John Rankin,7 a white anti-slavery Northerner, as ways in which to talk about this.
Now, what's really interesting is that in your chapter "Seduction and the Ruses of Power," you not only
explain how the positionality of black women and white women differs, but you also suggest
how blackness disarticulates the notion of consent, if we are to think of that notion as universal. You
write: "[BJeing forced to submit to the will of the master in all things defines the predicament of slavery"
(5, 110). In other words, the female slave is a possessed, accumulated, and fungible object, which is to say
that she is ontologically different than a white woman who may, as a house servant or indentured laborer,
be a subordinated subject. You go on to say, "The opportunity for nonconsent [as regards, in this case,
sex] is required to establish consent, for consent is meaningless if refusal is not an option. . . . Consent is
unseemly in a context in which the very notion of subjectivity is predicated upon the negation of will" (5,
111). S.V.H. — Once again, trying to fit into the other's shoes becomes the very possibility of narration. In
the chapter "A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl's Life," the question for Jacobs is how she can tell her
story in a way that's going to solicit her white readership when she has to efface her very condition in
order to make that story intelligible to them. I look at this messy moment as kind of a vortex in Jacobs'
narrative, where in order to fashion herself as a desiring subject, she has to deny the very violence,
which elsewhere she said defines her position as a slave: her status as a thing and the negation of her
will. In one sense, she has to bracket that so she can tell a story about sexuality that's meaningful in a
white dominant frame. And I think this is why someone like Hortense Spillers raises the question of
whether gender and sexuality are at all applicable to the condition of the captive community.8 That's what
I was working with there, that impossibility or tension between Jacobs as an agent versus the objective
conditions in which she finds herself. This is something you talk about in your work as well, this existence
in the space of death, where negation is the captive's central possibility for action, whether we think of
that as a radical refusal of the terms of the social order or these acts that are sometimes called suicide or
self-destruction, but which are really an embrace of death. Ultimately it's about the paradox of agency for
those who are in these extreme circumstances. And basically, there are very few political narratives that
can account for that. F.W. —And we have to ask why. In my own work, obviously I'm not saying that in
this space of negation, which is blackness, there is no life. We have tremendous life. But this life is not
analogous to those touchstones of cohesion that hold civil society together. In fact, the trajectory of our
life (within our terrain of civil death) is bound up in claiming — sometimes individually, sometimes
collectively — the violence which Fanon writes about in The Wretched of the Earth, that trajectory which,
as he says, is "a splinter to the heart of the world"9 and "puts the settler out of the picture."10 So, it
doesn't help us politically or psychologically to try to find ways in which how we live is analogous to how
white positionality lives, because, as I think your book suggests, whites gain their coherence by knowing
what they are not. There is tremendous diversity on the side of whiteness and tremendous conflict
between white men and white women, between Jews and gentiles, and between classes, but that conflict,
even in its articulation, has a certain solidarity. And I think that solidarity comes from a near or far
relation to the black body or bodies. We give the nation its coherence because we're its underbelly.11
S.V.H. — That's what's so interesting for me about Achille Mbembe's work, the way he thinks about the
position of the formerly colonized subject along the lines of the slave as an essential way of defining the
predicament. Essentially, he says, the slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be
squandered with impunity.12 F.W. — And he's suggesting that what it means to be a slave is to be subject
to a kind of complete appropriation, what you call "property of enjoyment." Your book illustrates the
"myriad and nefarious uses of slave property" and then demonstrates how "there was no relation to
blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and occupation of the captive body, for even the
status of free blacks was shaped and compromised by the existence of slavery" (5, 24). So. Not only are
formally enslaved blacks property, but so are formally free blacks. One could say that the possibility of
becoming property is one of the essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness.
But what's most intriguing about your argument is the way in which you demonstrate how not only is the
slave's performance (dance, music, etc.) the property of white enjoyment, but so is — and this is really key
— the slave's own enjoyment of his/her performance: that too belongs to white people.13
 Links – Racial Capitalism
When slavery ended the white people viewed the enslaved person’s freedom as a
debt to be paid back to them that still affect the racialized labor today.
[Isabell Lorey ‘22 is a political theorist and a Queer Studies Professor at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne and
works for transversal texts (transversal.at), the publication platform of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
(eipcp). “Democracy in the Political Present: A Queer-Feminist Theory”, Presentist Democrocy: Care practice and Queer Debt, Pg
133-135, Verso, 2022] ABoaitey
Conditions of domination and exploitation that reach further into the past, however, are also extended into the present of bad debt
through subprime loans that are difficult to repay. 59 Dispossession by slavery, and the prevention of ownership of
property and other assets by ‘freed people’, remain at the root of the asymmetrical economic relations
of debt in the present. A repetitive white moral discourse inculpates non-white borrowers as being responsible for their
own plight and therefore ‘not credit worthy’, which was what caused them to (again) take on unpayable debts and live beyond the
means allotted to them.60 This unpayable guilt/debt is ascribed to debtors through sexist-racist
constructions of subordination and lack, thus rendering invisible the entanglement of capitalism and racism in
slavery and colonialism. In this discourse, the racially marked body is not allowed to fully cultivate
the subjectivation that a loan contract demands. Endless indebtedness
corresponds to the status of being not-yet-white; in the white ideology of
superiority, work on the ‘black’ self always falls short of the white norm.61 And this was
precisely what allowed financial profit to be made from subprime loans. Already with the end of slavery in the US in 1865,
freedom and recognition as a self-responsible subject capable of entering into contracts was not an instant right, but something that
freed people had to prove themselves worthy of. Corresponding to the Latin meaning of the word emancipatio, emancipation
literally meant being discharged from the hand (manus) of the pater familias, the slave-holder, to be set free by him. In this logic,
distinct from the logic of white self-liberation as a sovereign act, former slaves became freed people, but not free people.62 Even
after 300 years of enslavement, whites still feared that black workers, supposedly
characterized by sluggishness and laziness, would not comply with a capitalist
production system based on free labour and possessive individualism. In Scenes of
Subjection, Saidiya Hartman has shown how, by means of advice books first and foremost, freed slaves were to be trained and
disciplined as free workers.63 In order to counter the refusal to become a working subject capable of signing contracts, white
discourse promoted a ‘willingness to endure hardships, which alone guaranteed success, upward mobility and the privileges of
citizenship’.64 In fact, coercion and violence were the more usual means of compelling
freed people to sign labour contracts and subject themselves to labour discipline,
means that went far beyond those used in capitalist labour relations otherwise,
and that were predicated on inequalities created by racist conditions of
domination. The subordination demanded of the former enslaved workers marked the continuities between slavery and
freedom. As emancipated persons made competent to sign contracts, of necessity they had to behave in accordance with liberal
individualism as both dutiful subordinates and rational, self-responsible individuals.65 Particular to the racist ambivalence of
subordination and freedom, however, was its basis in the construction of the guilt and debt of emancipation, which meant that
there was no prospect of freed people ever achieving the ideal autonomy of white
heterosexual masculinity. The freedom granted by the whites was seen as a gift from
the ‘benefactors’ to the enslaved, for which they needed to demonstrate gratitude
and worthiness, and which put them in debt to the whites, making them guilty and
increasing the compulsion to discipline. ‘The burden of debt, duty and gratitude [was] foisted onto the
newly emancipated in exchange or repayment for their freedom.’66 In the entanglement of autonomy and (self-)responsibility, the
white ‘investment of faith’ was viewed as moral debt to be paid back, as an investment which the involuntary ‘borrowers’ had to
prove themselves worthy of through sustained repayment. ‘To be free was to be a debtor – that is, obliged
and duty-bound to others.’67 This racist guilt/loan relationship is upheld by the
linking of guilt/debt and time. The freed were bound to the past by means of an
indebtedness for their freedom, because as free(d) autonomous individuals they were now made
responsible for the deeds attributed to them, including ones from the past. Should they fail, the
concessions could be revoked. This temporality of guilt/debt is a linear time that assures compliant behaviour. It binds the present
to the past and grafts a present full of deprivation onto the promise of becoming a worthy and respected citizen some day in the
future.68 According to this cynical logic, the ‘freed people’s’ guilt/debt for emancipation continues to bind
them even today, in an inverted responsibility to the past: the lasting individualized guilt/debt
enables the construction of a white national innocence and widespread amnesia with regard to
slavery. 69 This racist bad-loan logic supports the construction of white superiority, for which repayment of the loan can never
end. For the whites, it is a necessarily non-returnable debt. The white guilt/debt discourse demands of its others a double subjection:
selfdiscipline as a free(d) subject and the affirmation of eternal guilt in relation to white superiority, driven by the
promise of and desire for future independence, for a freedom which releases one
from social connections. For this reason, too, credit is asocial and uninterested in care.